Invitation for an unlearning journey to reclaim the natural Beingness
Sensing Feeling Being
We- existential knowledge Foundation are planning a 3 stage session with two online and one live session to explore what is wrong with our ‘modern’ mindsets which have become by default anti-nature and antilife and to explore how to reclaim our natural beingness which is totally nature-centric.
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
The first stage of the journey is to enquire into the damages of schooling in an online session on Feb 5th and 6th
The second stage is to understand the nature’s learning process again online on Feb 12 14 16 18.
The third stage will be live where one deeply explores how beauty and cognition are an integral process
DAMAGES OF SCHOOLING
All crises of modernity can be traced to one problem and it is the alienation of humans from life. Schooling systematically destroys our biological selves by making learning into a linguistic activity taking place in our minds. This negates our natural connection with the real world. Schooling destroys all our systems- the cognitive, psychological, physiological, social, cultural, spiritual and fragments our wholistic nature. Thus the integrity of knowledge, value, and beauty gets fragmented.
We are biologically equipped to learn the real world but education numbs and distorts this potential and rewires our cognitive system to engage with the written word.
We totally disrespect children by treating them as incapable by constantly teaching, instructing, and helping them. Why is that modernity never ever discussed knowledge creation? This is what we are doing all the time, choicelessly but the message we get right from childhood is that we have to be taught. This impacts us subconsciously and we are made to read books, instead of experiencing our real contexts, made to analyze and store second-hand information. Our assumption is that all this does not impact the way our cognitive system develops or our attitudes develop.
NATURAL LEARNING PROCESS
Natural learning is about the creation of knowledge of our contexts, autonomously. Learning, like breathing, is a choiceless activity as learning is the very nature of LIFE. Life also dictates what to learn and has endowed us with how to learn. Childhood is the time when children develop their natural cognitive foundation, meant for creating knowledge. Sensory input is the first layer of the foundation. This period requires total sensitivity on the part of the adults by providing freedom to children to explore on their own and respect for them to be. Understanding the true nature of learning can help us to rewire and reclaim our ability to create knowledge.
Life creates existential conditions for the sustenance and maintenance of life and the qualities required for the same are inbuilt into the living being’s DNA. Dual and opposing tendencies or qualities are therefore to be found within all living beings but integrated in a seamless manner. But all these seemingly opposing factors are held in a most precarious manner that a beautiful harmony is maintained all the time. Breaking of this integrity and harmony is the beginning of the rise of ‘modern’ beingness in humans. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact cause for this alienation as always life fools our attempt to understand this by always providing a chicken and egg situation. What caused what might always remain a mystery. But what is evident are the consequences.
Breakdown of the integrity, the re-cyclicity, and the resultant linearization, fragmentation, and compartmentalization at all levels.
1. CONDITION
The illiterates begin from the ‘unknown’ as there is no teaching and literates begin from the ‘known’ because they start with the printed word. (This has a tremendous impact on our way of Being due to this as the condition is responsible for the generation/ formation of our value system)
2. CONTENT
Illiterates LEARN the real WORLD- dynamic, ever-changing, integrated whereas the literates are TAUGHT the WORD- static, linear, fragmented, description, absent….and so on
3. PROCESS
Illiterates go through a process that leads to knowledge creation (a re-creation of knowledge which is what all biological beings are involved in) whereas literates start with knowledge as a product which they store in an organized and easily recallable manner by using reason. Learning is from the inside out whereas teaching is from the outside in!
4. UNDERSTANDING
Illiterates ‘understand in the realm of experience (where the body and the world meet) whereas the literates ‘understand’ in the realm of language (where the body and authentic experience has been outlawed, that is in the fragmented mind).
5. LANGUAGE
The most important thing to understand is the difference between the way illiterates learn and use language and the way literates learn and use language. Illiterates retain the integrity of the world and the word as the word is picked up in context and in experience. Language is used in conjunction with experience. Experience and the word are like the verb and noun. Whereas for the literates the language has an independent existence as the ‘learning’ itself is outside the experiential context. Hence language is learned in absence of the body/ experience, by the mind directly and it removes the natural process by which abstraction and conceptualization happen. So, literates use imposed language whereas the illiterates use created language which has come out of them. (one language is experiential whereas the other is masculine and conceptual. So it only among the illiterates we can use the word mother tongue and we must call ours father tongue.)
As a consequence, this is what happens are the following
CONTEXT
illiterates get rooted in their respective contexts by the process called ‘learning’ whereas the literates get disconnected from their respective context because they imbibe and ‘learn’ decontextualized information. Illiterates LIVE whereas we talk about living. They become life and we machine!
CONSTRUCTS
Literates have been creating a world using their mental constructs which seems very real to them the way schools, museums, hospitals, vaccination, jobs, art, play, toy, performance, teaching has become so real. Without most of the constructs, modern life becomes meaningless.
The shift from quality and process to quantity and product is what this has done.
Hence among the illiterates ‘knowing’ is by being, totally effortless whereas literates seem to ‘know’ but don’t know how to be!
BEING IN BEAUTY
Beauty is a part and parcel of our biological makeup which can only be sensed and felt whereas art is a mental construct. Beauty is a dynamic configuration of appropriateness, inherent in nature. We are born aligned to this configuration. But modern education derails us from this alignment. Education labels people as artists and non-artists. Instead of awakening us to our inherent qualities and retaining our wholeness, education conditions our sense of beauty and fragments the integrity of the world into knowledge, art, and values, and turns beauty into the mental construct called art. Re-exploring the real function of art non intellectually could help us to reintegrate and address our alienation.
FOR WHOM
•For all those who want to reclaim their authentic and original Beingness, who want to address the damages of schooling and reclaim their ability to create knowledge.
•For PARENTS who dislike the modern way of controlled parenting and want to create a conducive environment for children’s natural awakening and respect children’s autonomy.
•For TEACHERS who do not like to teach but want to create an enabling environment for children to create knowledge.
•For those in RESEARCH who want to understand a totally different paradigm based on how we create knowledge and not just analyze second-hand information.
•For DE-SCHOOLERS, UN-SCHOOLERS, HOMESCHOOLERS, ALTERNATIVE SCHOOLERS, etc. to understand how to reimagine learning as an autonomous process where children create knowledge and how teaching them mechanizes their natural learning process
•For STUDENTS who want to reclaim their ability to create knowledge and awaken their authentic aesthetic sense which is equally important to the development of intelligence.
•For ARCHITECTS who want to understand how architecture shapes the cognitive process in children.
•For ARTISTS who want to understand how the present notions of art are detrimental to children’s natural awakening of their authentic aesthetic sense.
•For DESIGNERS who create toys and other exclusive products for children to understand how children’s process orientation and innovative abilities are destroyed by readymade ‘products’
•For Children’s STORY WRITERS how we undermine children’s natural imagination and replace it with imaginary and often silly imagination.
For PLAY WORKERS who really love children to understand they are the most detrimental to children’s natural play and their very existence is a total disrespect to the very nature of children.
Join us in this journey
